More than alcohol fueled the high spirits. A team of
JPMorgan bankers, all in their 20s, had just dreamed up a new
insurance product for loans that would bring absurdly huge
profits. Their invention of the credit default swap set in
motion a path to untold riches and global crisis.

Frontline certainly isn’t the first to report the Boca
Raton tale -- “Fool’s Gold” author Gillian Tett receives on-air credit -- or the “too big to fail” days of 2008. But the
series’ first two hours (parts three and four were not finished
in time for review) do an exemplary job of walking viewers
through a 14-year saga defined by daunting complexity.

Compelling History

With access to Wall Street players -- and the top reporters
who covered them, including Joshua Green of Bloomberg
Businessweek -- “Frontline” assembles a compelling history.
“Money, Power and Wall Street” is demanding -- this isn’t
Finance for Dummies -- but it’s a compact and thorough lesson.

Series producer Martin Smith steers a first hour
highlighted by interviews with the JPMorgan bankers who created
those profitable new financial tools. Blythe Masters, for one,
recounts the company’s first credit default swap (for Exxon,
stung with billions in losses from the Valdez oil spill).
Derivatives trader Terri Duhon details JPMorgan’s expansion of
the practice to multi-investor portfolios.

Other banks soon joined the unregulated free-for-all, with
an increasing reliance on risky but profitable credit default
swaps tied to home mortgages. Politicians of all stripes turned
a blind eye.

Financial consultant Satyajit Das tells “Frontline,” “We
were just moving the risk from one party to another party.”

“You could just about drive by a bank and they’d throw a
loan paper in your car as you passed by,” says Roy Barnes, the
Georgia governor routed from office in 2002 after angering the
banking lobby with a tough (and soon gutted) predatory lending
law.

Boarded-Up Homes

In the second hour, Michael Kirk examines the 2008 bail-out, beginning with the implosion of Bear Stearns & Co. and
ending with the government’s injection of $125 billion of public
money into eight banks. Despite some initial reluctance, the
banks, says economist Robert Reich, “were sitting fat and
pretty and happy.”

Though the events chronicled in Kirk’s hour will be
familiar (from HBO’s adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Too
Big to Fail,” for starters) the program feels fresh and vivid -
- and takes no prisoners.

A highlight: A blow-by-blow account of the White House
meeting in which President George W. Bush briefed Congressional
leaders and presidential candidates on the bail-out. Observing a
grandstanding Barack Obama and a bumbling John McCain, Bush,
says “Frontline,” whispered to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,
“You guys are going to miss me.”

Plenty of Blame

“Frontline” finds plenty of blame to go around (Goldman
Sachs and CEO Lloyd Blankfein take a particular bruising), but
is most devastating in its dissection of the chummy collusion
between bankers and the government leaders who should have been
watch-dogging them.

“It’s quite clear that there was massive illegality going
on” during Wall Street’s boom and bust years, says Dennis
Kelleher, a former Skadden Arps attorney who now serves as
president of Better Markets, a nonprofit that promotes public
interest in financial reform.

Parts 3 and 4, airing May 1, will focus on the Obama White
House and current Wall Street practices.

“Money, Power and Wall Street” airs Tuesday on the Public
Broadcasting Service’s “Frontline” at 9 p.m. New York time.
Rating: ***1/2